To The Brink Of Burnout And Back Again

I didn’t realize it until it was nearly too late.

I didn’t realize it until it was nearly too late. For several months, I avoided meetings, procrastinated, and couldn’t focus. In hindsight, it was obvious: I was getting burnt out.

How did I get here?

My foray into product management started auspiciously. I was motivated and had a clear plan. What the hell happened? It’s tempting to try to pin it on a single cause, but in reality it was likely the combination of several factors:

  • No post-onboarding plan
  • Broad scope of product oversight
  • Piloting a different hiring process
  • No clear “wins” after months of effort
  • Lack of established processes

No post-onboarding operating framework

My initial 90-day onboarding plan was explicit and informed by a learning framework. Past that, my plans were a bit light on specifics. From my onboarding, I identified that we needed to define a clear product vision and strategy in addition to facilitating planning and execution of projects. But how does that translate into what my day-to-day and week-to-week should be? I didn’t have a great framework for organizing how I should operate.

As a result, I had trouble being proactive and ended up reacting to urgent needs and requests from others. Given my broad scope of product oversight, it was easy to become wholly consumed by reactive work. I remember many times when I would cycle endlessly—and mindlessly—between email and Slack to tackle the next reactive thing that came in. It wasn’t healthy.

Broad scope of product oversight

I oversee the products produced by five engineering teams. These are internal data platform products that include:

  • data pipeline infrastructure tools
  • data discovery products
  • foundational analytics datasets
  • experimentation services

The list of customer segments is broad: software engineers, data analysts, marketers, data scientists, and product managers. And it’s not just product I’m responsible for. Many of these products have a UI as well, but we don’t have any part- or full-time designers dedicated to this area. So UX and UI design falls to me as well.

Piloting a different hiring process

It was clear from even before I started that we’d need to hire a second product manager to help. Since I started in this role, I had been actively hiring. However, the entire process took longer than usual because I wanted to improve the typical product manager hiring process to reduce bias and increase diversity. There was more back-and-forth with recruiting to post an acceptable job description, and more time spent planning and coordinating the interview process. Ironically, this contributed to my already heavy workload and delayed getting help. But regardless, I’m glad I did because we learned a lot from it which I’ll share in an upcoming post. Most importantly, I hired someone who promises to be a great partner in product.

No “wins” after months of effort

I heard someone describe burnout as the application of effort without positive feedback or success. That feels true. My learning plan definitely called out the need to make small changes in order to learn, build trust, and gain momentum. However, applying that was more challenging than expected.

Relatively early on, I identified what I thought was one such small change: sunsetting a legacy SDK and API used for serving A/B experiments. Teams using those legacy components were eager to get off them, but unexpected attrition in engineering meant that our team would have to pause that work to devote more of our staffing to higher-priority projects for the greater org. Unfortunately for me, those higher-priority projects were long-running with completion dates months away.

Surely there were small UX issues I could have addressed? Perhaps, if I hadn’t been so spread thin. I was still learning about customers’ needs across my entire scope of ownership and didn’t have much time to go deep working on any particular UX.

Lack of established processes

We didn’t have definitive answers to any of these questions:

  • How do we review and change our strategy?
  • How do we discover, distill, and prioritize customer needs?
  • How do we capture, synthesize, and act on customer feedback?
  • How do we plan what to work on for the next few months?
  • How do we test, build, release, and iterate on solutions?

Don’t get me wrong, I love that none of these had been answered yet. This ambiguity is what attracted me to this role in the first place. It’s a clean slate, our own create-your-own-adventure. However, this ambiguity combined with everything else above probably contributed to my near-burnout.

What did I do?

Several things:

  1. I talked to someone about how I felt.
  2. I created a plan.
  3. I took a break.

Talk to someone

This someone was my manager. The first thing we discussed is why we didn’t talk about my feelings of burnout earlier—especially since we have 1:1s twice a week. We attributed it up to my own lack of self-realization that I was getting burnt out and to a period of fewer 1:1s because of vacations and scheduling conflicts.

My manager and I talked through my feelings and what could be contributing to them. Together, we created a plan to address those probable causes.

Create a plan

  • Focus on hiring that second product manager.
  • Identify the steps needed to define the things that are missing: product vision, strategy, operational model, and processes. Coincidentally, I had just finished reading Inspired by Marty Cagan which provided a helpful operating model to try.
  • Delegate project management to engineering managers or technical program managers (TPMs).
  • Be less of a bottleneck for filtering low-level or urgent requests from customers by empowering engineering managers to handle many of those requests directly while keeping me in the loop.
  • Reflect on how I’m feeling and doing every two weeks.
  • Take a break.

Take a break

I took two weeks off the grid. One with family in Europe, another alone as a staycation. If I’m being honest, the second one was the most restful, because there’s no such thing as fun for the whole family (ha). I would have taken more, but after two weeks I was feeling better and eager to put my plan into action.

What did I learn?

This was a great learning experience. My key takeaways:

  • Reflect regularly on how you’re feeling and why. I’ve started a daily journaling practice and will continue my regular retrospectives with my manager.
  • Be kind to yourself. You’re not a robot. It’s a certainty that some days you’ll feel great, and other days you won’t. Don’t beat yourself up on the latter days; treat yourself like you would a friend or loved one in the same situation.
  • Take time off for mental health. Any amount helps, from a few hours to a whole week. I’ve started using sick time for those days when I’m feeling mentally drained and need a break. Sick days shouldn’t be used only for when you have the flu; your mind is part of your body too.
  • Work backwards from the end to define the plan. Start with the end—what outcome you want to achieve—and work backwards to identify the steps needed to make it true.

In the end, I’m glad I identified the burnout when I did and didn’t try to power through it like many others do.

Stay safe, stay sane.

Mike